It’s Always Too Soon to Quit: Jay Setchell on Resilience, Faith, Purpose, and the Strength Within

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Telling My Story, the podcast where we explore real life stories, personal growth, career journey, challenges, and the lessons that have shaped our lives. I'm Henry Chiwetel, and today we are having a conversation about resilience, faith, purpose, leadership, entrepreneurship, and what it really means to keep going when life doesn't go according to plan. My guest is Jay Setshell. Did I get the name correct?

Yes,

sir. All right. an entrepreneur, former Marine, leader, mentor, and resilient survivor. Jay's life has been shaped by experiences that could have easily stopped him, including multiple life-threatening experiences, surgeries, setbacks, business challenges, and major personal obstacles. Yet, one message continues to define his philosophy. always so soon to quit. Jay believes that our future isn't simply something that happens to us. It's influenced by the choices we make, the mindsets we develop, the courage we show, and our willingness to keep moving forward. From growing up on a working farm to serving in the military corps building businesses raising a family and navigating significant challenges jay has accumulated decades of lessons about perseverance leadership faith and purpose today we are going to hear the stories behind those lessons jay welcome to telling my story it's a pleasure to have you here with us today

henry it's good to be here my friend i can i can tell because before we started we had a couple of pretty good laughs so i'm i'm going to enjoy the Listening to some of your questions and giving you some responses. Thank you for having

me. All right, Jay. I really enjoyed the free conversation we had before this. So you have experienced multiple life-threatening situations and major challenges throughout your life. Can you take us back to some of those experiences and tell us how they changed you?

Sure. I... I say it with all respect for life because if it wasn't for the good Lord, I wouldn't be here. And I started out on, like you said, a working farm. And when I was a kid, I'd step on nails. And I remember one time I had a nail come all the way through my boot, my shoe, my foot, my shoe, and back out the top of my boot. And my grandfather... bent down and put a foot on each side of my foot on the wood that I'd stepped on with a nail through it. And he said, and he put his hand, he said, he put my arms on his hands on the top of his shoulders and reached underneath my knee. And he said, okay, on three, I'm going to pull your foot up off this nail. You know, and it was in the winter. The snow was about six, eight inches deep and not too bad. And, you know, like about zero degrees or 10 below, And he said, okay, one, two, and he pulled my foot up. And my God, you know, I was like seven years old, maybe eight. And, uh, you know, but they cut the boot off and they stuck a syringe in the top and they ran water through it or saline solution. And the water ran right out the bottom of my foot. It was, it was pretty wild. It was pretty crazy, but you know, um, that, but that was just like a little beginning when I was 17, I was on a feeding auger, uh, walking down it, uh, came, climbed down a silo